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Transformers

Boy, it sure has been a quiet summer; the last mail I got from 
"teslanet" was way back in May.  I hope somebody has been doing 
more than I have for the past few months (which is nothing!).  Now that 
summer seems to be winding down and the kids will be going back to 
school, I should finally be able to make some time for experimentation.

I recently bought four microwave oven transformers.  They're rated at 4 
kV, and I have no idea what the current is.  Since the secondaries are 
not center-tapped or grounded, I'm going to try wiring pairs together in 
series and ground the center to get 8kV out, and then wire the two 8kV 
units in parallel to increase the current.  

Now some questions...

- Does anybody have any idea what the current rating on a typical 
microwave oven transformer is?  Are they rated for continuous duty?

- Has anybody ever hooked two transformers up in series to double the 
output voltage?  I'm assuming that I can tie the two secondary grounds 
together and make sure the primary input voltages are 180 degrees out 
of phase by simply reversing the 120 volt wires to one transformer if I 
don't get any high voltage output.  If nobody knows, hopefully I'll get 
the time to find out these answers in the next week or two, so I'll let you 
know how it goes. 


Steven Roys (sroys-at-anchorage.ab.umd.edu)